


next to my own skin, her pearls

by queenofmarigolds



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/F, Gothic, SuperCorp, i'd call it kind of gothic but it's only 4k so it's like a gothic interlude, idk what to tag in this case, read it i think you might like it, the homoeroticism of the gothic genre everybody!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26506279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofmarigolds/pseuds/queenofmarigolds
Summary: Lena Luthor lives alone in her family's manor. Or as alone as one can be when living with her father and her husband. Alone until her lady’s maid, Kara Danvers.A gothic-like story where these two girls fall in love and the house is half alive with ghosts and Kara is cold all the time, until she's in Lena's arms.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 11
Kudos: 120





	next to my own skin, her pearls

**Author's Note:**

> hi. this is the product of the poem Warming Her Pearls, the book Rebecca, and me being cold in my bedroom. also the theory I have that gothic is the most sapphic genre and I love it. 
> 
> the title is from that poem, and I’m sorry in advance for this because it’s kinda just… there.

Kara Danvers had never encountered a house quite so beautiful as the Luthor Manor. In that regard, she’d never encountered a more haunting one, a colder sweep of land, an emptier set of rooms (even while filled with guests). Before she’d come to work at the house she really always had considered beautiful things to be _beautiful_ , beautiful in all respects. Beauty was warmth, she was sure, beauty was in joyful things and moments of pleasure, in family and sunshine and songbirds.

When writing to Eliza, she often assured her that her new post hadn’t changed her a bit, that the Luthor Manor was chilly but Kara was as normal as ever, that upon her return Eliza would put all her fears to bed and it would all be alright. Kara was conscious that this was a lie, to an extent. Eliza didn’t need to worry, that much was true. Kara was the same, mostly.

The main difference was the very definition of beauty she considered apt. A childhood of wildflowers and pound cakes had taught her that beauty was in the light, but she knew better now. Beauty could be harsh, could be petrifying. Beauty froze you in its touch. Beauty was ice and blue and quick cuts of stone that barely warmed to the touch. Beauty was the Manor, its empty ballrooms and their dust collecting chairs. It stretched its hands at the unpolished silver, beat at the cobwebs draped over the high shelves of the library. Beauty inched its way up the vanity Kara mended before nighttime, clawing at the gold-handled hairbrush and the swoops of necklaces. Beauty existed more clearly in this dead household than it ever had in Kara’s life, and sometimes she had to stop and breathe in that truth. 

Beauty was Lena Luthor. Her severe stance, the angles of her nose and her chin, the tumble of black hair down her back. Kara found beauty there like an untapped well- unclaimed, untreasured. Bursting forward at her touch. 

Lena hadn’t considered her upon their first meeting. Kara supposed it made sense. Lena wasn’t alone in the house but it felt that way, the Manor had a way of taking and sucking and bleaching. Kara was sure it could kill. The halls were quiet, unanswering- once in her first weeks she’d yelled out to them when she was alone in the house, there was barely an echo. Her shout cut itself off quick and simple, dying in the same breath it was born, and that was the first chill up Kara’s spine, the first hint of an underlying terror. She knew instinctively that nothing would hurt her in this house, but still. Still.

But no, Lena wasn’t alone. She was married, of all things, which was sickeningly strange for reasons Kara couldn’t quite grasp, reasons that settled in her chest. Jack Spheer was a bright presence, somehow the only member of the Manor who didn’t seem ghostly from it, Kara even remembered thinking he was the warmest of the group- before she knew Lena well, of course. Before she knew her intimately.

Then there was Lena’s father, who was ancient and dusting and had his own wing and seldom came out. 

It had struck Kara at some point that Lena was the only woman before she’d arrived, that in a household of three Lena was outnumbered. Somehow, it didn’t feel that way. Lena had injected herself into the veins of the house, a careful femininity bursting forth whenever you least expected to stumble upon it.

It was odd, to say the least. The house was odd, the residents odd, the meals and the parties and the cleaning odd. There was technically a butler, but Kara had seen him all of twice. There were technically gardens, but they were unreachable, as far as Kara could tell. She had no idea how to get to the heart of the stone palace. 

And for a ladies’ maid, Kara never saw the lady. She _saw_ her, sure, saw her to adjust her corset and fasten her pearls, but Lena’s eyes were empty, never a word exchanged between the two of them. It was quiet. Lonely. 

It was odd, then, when Lena finally spoke to her. Kara had been at the Manor for months, maybe, she’d lost track of time. She never remembered the dates of significant events, could never tell how long it had been since one because the numbers and times slipped her mind, leaving her with only the inscrutable feeling she so often had, the one that itched and glided its way around her thoughts, the glimmering importance that kept them in her mind. 

So she didn’t know how long it had been, exactly, but when she said Lena hadn’t spoken she meant it. She hummed, she nodded at Kara- she expressed her words. But she’d never spoken one in Kara’s presence until that first time, that first night. The date passed her by- never remembering significant dates was all well and good, just another funny anecdote Alex could tell about her clumsy baby sister, until the most important date of her life arrived without her there to catch it. 

It had been winter, in any event, probably early December. The windows shook so hard they seemed they should crack, the stone house’s chill dropped to impossibly colder levels, and the ice slammed shut as Lena said her first words.

As a child, Kara had a pond near her house. In winter, it would freeze over, the ice so thick she really could skate on it, which is what she did, scarf trailing behind her and hands reaching up to brush snow from pine trees she glided past. The last winter at that home up north the ice had snapped. She’d been on it as usual. She remembered the aching quiet, the one sound of the breaking before falling into the freezing cold, cold like Kara had never known, and it was so quiet, so empty, so much like death she could hardly stand it. Pale, bloated, empty.

Her father had pulled her out that day. She’d sat by the fire under a firm blanket with her parents beside her, hot water in a mug between her palms. It was ironic, she gathered, that she’d felt the cold so supremely, because she declared that she’d never die by the ice and just a month later her parents died by the fire. Kara should have, too, should never have made it out alive, but the cold still ached in her bones. The Manor brought it out in her.

Some girls would have turned away upon seeing the arching silence of the Manor on their first day, but Kara hadn’t. The cold was already within her, had been since that day, and she fell back into the ice like she had been born to.

Lena’s words were like that cracked pond. She spoke them after Kara had rushed into her chambers from the direction of Lionel’s. They were spoken but quiet, surrounded by so much silence, surrounded by such a chill that Kara wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. 

“I do apologize for my father, Kara. I know you aren’t tasked with him but even half dead he demands his services.”

Kara was half sure she’d imagined the voice, melodic and lilting, but she looked up from the clothes she’d been smoothing on Lena’s bed to see the woman looking expectantly at her, her green eyes sharp.

Kara would have responded cleverly, she was an intelligent woman, she swore, but instead she found herself blurting, “You know my name?”

Lena raised an eyebrow. “Well of course I do. You told me. And who did you think hired you?”

“I- I thought Mr. Spheer-,”

“Oh, call him Jack, please. He can’t be burdened with such heavy last names. And in that vein, call me Lena. I may have somehow managed to hold on to my own last name in the marriage, but that does not mean I am fond of it.”

Kara knew she was gaping slightly, but Lena didn’t seem perplexed, sitting down at her vanity and letting her long fingers dance over her combs. She was looking at Kara through her mirror, though, and Kara felt herself straighten up at the gaze.

“So, Kara Danvers. Tell me, Kara, what do you know of radio-activity?”

And so it began. 

Lena was quiet in company. She was fond of Jack, she confided in Kara, as much as she’d thought she would hate him. “I’d always dreamed I’d find the man I married quite unbearable, in all respects,” she’d told Kara in her chambers one evening, “but I do like Jack. He’s sweet to me, talks with me often about history. He has a passion for Richard I, always going on about the Crusades and his foolish downfall. He rewarded the man who killed him, you know. The one who gave him a fatal wound. I find the idea of it very romantic.”

“It’s good that you love him,” Kara had said. She was perched on Lena’s bed mending a dress. Lena had started letting her stay in her chambers, talking with her.

Lena had tilted her head then. Her expression was a serene calm, a contemplation. “I love him, yes,” she said slowly, “but not as one loves a husband. I love him as though he is my long lost brother, or my childhood friend from the estate of an estranged aunt. A kindred spirit, yes. But a romance? No, I’d say not.”

Despite the kinship, meals were quiet on Lena’s end. She would sit, eating while gazing raptly at the ceiling or her own hand, as though she hadn’t seen the same sights every day of her life. Jack would talk loudly to Kara, clapping her on the back and reminiscing about boats. 

And Lena would sit there. She would gaze at her fork, smile at the last bit of light curling onto the dinner table, and then her eyes would land on Kara and Kara would no longer be able to eat. 

The green of Lena’s eyes reminded Kara of so much, of missed opportunity, of fortune, of home. In the right light they were blue, and they were anger and ice and looming presences. Lena herself was a looming presence, she could make someone wilt with a single glance, raise an eyebrow and crush a man’s bones, but she never did it to Kara. For Kara, her eyes danced with silent amusement she never voiced until they were alone. Kara would not have it any other way. 

It was quite a game Lena played. Kara would bring her breakfast and Lena would groan, press a forearm to her eyes and squint up at Kara, complaining of sunlight and mornings. And then suddenly she’d be out of bed, floating around the room and touching the little things, showing Kara tiny shreds of seashells she’d found at the shore. Lena never sat still, she never paused, and Kara found herself enraptured.

She fell in love too easily, always had, but with Lena it was never a question. She just kept playing that game; silent in public and then, when they were alone, pulling forth every last bit of a conversation and preaching about science and geometry. She was as strange as they came, Lena Luthor. 

Kara didn’t know what it was that made Lena so fond of her. She was fond, she had confided this in Kara, telling her that she was really the first ladies’ maid Lena had ever really understood. So Lena was fond of Kara and Kara adored Lena, admired her with every scrap of her being. The next life changing, earth shattering event came several months after Lena’s first sentences, date hazy in Kara’s mind. It was after a party, though, and the Luthor Manor parties were elegant. 

The place was dead, but the life that came from the gatherings was confusing. The Manor was a brooding place, a broken area to inhabit while one’s life was trapped. The parties were the opposite, full of pinks and golds and swirling drinks, music and dancing and top hats and skirts. Lena was the picture of a hostess, on Jack’s arm and leaning in to kiss on cheeks. Kara had seen two parties previously in her time at the Manor, before she’d known Lena. She had been stunned then at the duality of the woman. 

Now she knew Lena, deadly well, better than most. Now she was mesmerized. 

When Lena laughed with Kara it lit her up, cracking her features until they glowed, eyes full of care and interest. When Lena laughed at the party it was different, not _fake_ per se but bigger, presentative. Her head fell back and her eyes would scrunch and Kara could see a freckle in the center of her neck from her spot in the corner. She was tactile, touching the guests on their shoulders and lacing her fingers with Jack’s. She was out of place but she was home- it was a different Lena, Kara knew, the Lena of parties and appearances. Kara was lucky to have the Lena of science and secrets. And now she had both, she had all.

When the party was over, she watched Lena duck around a corner, gesture at Kara. Kara jumped, found herself following after the woman leading a winding trail towards- there it was, the gardens Kara knew of. 

Lena stood amongst the roses, still giving Kara that appraising look of hers.

“Hello, Kara.”

“Hello. That party was more fascinating than usual, it felt like something out of Jane Austen.”

“What, Pride and Prejudice?”

“Most likely, yes. I do adore that book.”

Lena hummed. “I have a penchant for female leads, in fiction. I find it makes literature ever so much more interesting.”

Lena was still glowing, the mix of the golds of the party and the cracks in her skin at the smile she saved for Kara so overwhelming that Kara found herself even closer. She could not pull away.

And then she was inches from Lena’s face and Lena looked proud, satisfied. Her eyebrows raised. 

“Hello, Kara.”

“H-hello.” Being so close to Lena was intoxicating, not the same as adjusting her pearls or fixing her dress. Her eyes were like depths of water.

“I knew you’d get here eventually.”

“Get where?” Kara asked, though she knew the answer. Lena smirked.

“May I kiss you, Ms. Danvers?”

“Please.”

It was as though Kara had broken through ice again, fallen down into the depths of the water of Lena’s eyes, but this time it was warmth enveloping her. Her bone chill felt like it was dissipating. She could breathe. And Lena was there, moving against her lips, far from chaste, taking little breaths and wrapping her arms around Kara’s shoulders and Kara felt her own at Lena’s waist and _oh_.

They broke off and Kara felt dizzy, felt Lena smiling up at her, and her next words were supremely stupid. “What about Jack?”

“Oh, please. You know that boat he captains and adores? Jack is off kissing the first mate.”

Kara laughed, thumbed Lena’s cheek. “Lena,” she breathed.

Lena hummed again. 

“You were radiant tonight.”

“Aren’t I always?” She was teasing, eyes glinting, but there was a shred of that loneliness Kara knew was there and she met Lena’s gaze head on.

“Yes,” Kara replied solemnly, “always.”

Lena touched her fingers to Kara’s chest then, leaned in again. The feeling tingled long after Lena had retired to bed, late into the early morning as Kara sat up in her own bed, quaking with the possibilities of this, of always. 

\--

Lena liked to be clandestine. It wasn’t as though Jack cared much, and Lionel could barely walk, but Kara understood. It wasn’t blind covertness, after all. The house watched, very much alive, its hallways pulsing and its entryways repulsed as Kara pulled Lena in under the curving staircase to press tiny kisses to her cupid’s bow. 

The house was alive and it ached with ghosts, and still Lena held her parties and hosted teas with women who arrived in colors much too bright for the grays of Lena’s house. 

The closeness of the night, the touch of Kara at Lena’s neck unclasping her jewelry, the glances over shoulders, the silence of Lena’s bare form curled in Kara’s arms. This was what she could recite, this was the poetry of her life, and the touches and kisses and _beauty_ was perfect. It was growing.

And now Kara wore Lena’s pearls. The house had a bone chill, the walls were always closing in and getting colder, the nonexistent forest creeping up to a screaming and rioting Dunsinane. The air was frozen, but now Kara hated for Lena to be, needed her skin to go pink under her blush and rosy where Kara rubbed her shoulders as she dressed Lena in the evenings. Kara wore Lena’s pearls to warm them, to keep them to her breast.

It was Lena’s bidding that caused her to do so, and the private smiles she would get as she felt the chain dip beneath her neckline were worth it enough. Kara wasn’t warm by nature, but her skin crept out, curling around the whites of the pearls and the golds of the clasps and in the early evening she’d fasten the necklace back around Lena’s neck.

The neck freckle would taunt her, Kara would brush her ring finger over it on her hand’s upward sweep, fingers tracking Lena’s jawline and lingering on her lips for the woman to kiss softly. 

Kara wore her pearls and thought of her. Lena was so quiet, so solemn, so different in a sea of sameness, but still she would choose her gown and spray her perfume and go out for the evening, sometimes even staying nights at faraway manors and foreign parties.

And as she was gone, away in her carriage like a fairy tale princess, Kara was in the house alone with Lionel. The man slept soundly, unaware of his daughter’s ladies’ maid in her attic, grazing her fingertips across her neck where the pearls were missing, thinking of Lena off where she was and how it would feel to kiss her lips every moment of every day, how quickly she could die for Lena and how eagerly she would do it. Quaking under the possibilities, the intensity.

In summer months, getaways became longer, the house still cold to the core but the air warm, and Kara was stifling in her room, curling her hand in a stolen sheet of Lena’s that smelled like her, reminded her of the last time she’d laid with her. Lena was beautiful, Lena was all the beauty Kara trembled at accepting. 

Kara could see her as she was far away, twirling with men who told Jack how lovely his wife was. Kara could see Lena touching her pearls, twisting for the scent of Kara herself, doing that lovely thing she did with her eyes where she focused on the beautiful things in the room. Kara would lie awake, would guess what Lena would fix on- a pretty pink flower in a woman’s hair, the lace at another’s wrist, and the pearls draped from her own neck, warm from Kara’s heat, love in the shared objects.

Lena came home from her parties in her carriage, leaping out and escorting Jack out every time, which made Kara chuckle. And then it was the last party of the season, winter coming again, and Lena was back at her mirror with her lips smiling up at Kara while her eyes had that adoring look in them and oh, oh. 

Kara would listen to this woman talk about her Rutherford books and her radio-activity and whatever inane science ideas came next. Kara would hear her thoughts on every woman in every story, Kara would watch her knock over her pieces in chess with a raised eyebrow and a tiny smile whenever Kara (rarely) captured one, Kara would look at her eyes as she watched her over dinner for the rest of her life, if she could. Maybe, like this, she could.

Kara wore the pearls, fastening them to Lena’s chest at six o’clock, after a long day of warming. Lena would always hiss in a tiny way as they touched her chest- they were not hot nor cold, but she did it either way, and Kara felt their weight disappear and in the nights she pined for them, pined for _Lena_ , knowing the pearls sat cold on her vanity and Lena lay in her bed waiting to tease Kara the next morning. 

Lena’s pearls were magic, Lena herself was magic. Lena was what the poets spoke of, she was the fire in Kara’s chest. 

In the nights, those several nights where Kara lay awake for hours and hours, Lena would wait for her unknowingly in her sleep. When Kara would slip out of the attic, holding her lantern and letting her finger joints freeze themselves still, Lena would wait.

The Manor was freezing in winter. Lena had said that was when her mother came out of the shadows, that she didn’t believe in ghosts but that if anyone could become one it was Lillian Luthor. Kara didn’t know the woman, but still she felt her behind every motion. When Kara touched the pearls out in the foyer and Lena beamed, the ghosts flitted down Kara’s back. When she spent her free time in the library dusting, gazing down at Lena reading her newest book, they whispered in her ears.

There was a new recurring nightmare. It came maybe in January, when the snow had fallen and the window panes had flakes frozen to them as though caught in the act. Kara would thrash in her thin bedsheets, reaching for Lena and knowing that they could not spend every night together, but then again realizing Lena would welcome her with open arms, would soothe her and love her and her pearls would drip down Kara’s chest like hot wax.

The nightmare went that Kara was wandering the halls late at night, that Lionel was wailing and it sounded just like the faint yells Kara had heard from her house when it had burned to the ground. Kara knew, in the dream, that he was dying, knew she had to find him and find Lena and kiss her better but the walls were a maze, the Manor was trying to trick her and confuse her and it hated her, wanted her away from its daughter. The Manor was alive, would speak in a commanding, booming voice, a woman’s voice, and hands would crawl themselves out from the floor. As she ran, faster and faster down the halls, she heard Lena calling her name. Kara could feel the walls closing in, still the Birnam Wood charting its way forward, could feel herself back in that pond as a child. The water would be hot, like Lena’s kisses, but the cold would start at her toes and crawl up to her knees, her hips, her chest, her neck. The place the pearls should sit but couldn’t at night burned, the only thing free of the chill as her hair froze and her eyes locked shut. 

Kara would wake in a sweat, thinking in a flurry of ten things at once, ten “first thoughts”. There was Eliza, and then there was Alex- she hadn’t seen them since the early fall, a few months back, waxing lyrical about the black and green of Lena, the warmth in her. Jack was next, and Kara would consider him and his first mate at sea, the one with the jaunty cap and the dark beard. Then Lionel, and then her parents, her childhood cat, every person who’d ever crossed her path. 

Lena was last, most important, and Lena was what she thought of as her joints froze again and she kept her hand to the cold wall, tracing her path with the faint light of her lantern to Lena’s chambers. 

It happened over and over, the house seemed out to get her, but within her deepest being Kara knew it would be okay, knew every time Lena’s voice, clouded by sleep, would answer her knocks at her door in the middle of the night.

“Kara?”

“It’s me. Can I…”

“Of course.”

And then Kara would come in and Lena would be rubbing her eyes, hair tousled and brow wrinkled as she asked what was wrong. And Kara would repeat her dream, Lena would point out whatever new detail had wormed its way in there, and Lena would grow more awake. Her pearls sat out on her nightstand, ready for Kara to wear as a token the next morning, and Lena would wear her kisses, because when Lena blew out the candle Kara was no longer cold. How could she be, when her bones melted next to this woman? 

Kara would fit herself behind Lena, letting herself inhale her hair and her smell and let her arms drape over Lena’s soft skin and soft hips. And Lena would murmur things at her, about birds and living houses and Kara would answer in questions and gardens, and before they would fall asleep they would whisper declarations of love.

So. That was how Kara knew that she was going to be okay, wanting this forever.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope this is not an interest only i have and someone else found this concept interesting? i know there are gothic stories in this fandom but i love supercorp and i love the genre so much that i kinda had to do this. it can never live up to seabiscuit's legendary gothic au but i can try to do this genre close to that much justice. 
> 
> okay anyways my twitter is [here](https://twitter.com/queenofmarigxld) . and this is my tumblr [here](https://blackseablacksky.tumblr.com/)but you should know that i really don't use it that much but maybe i should


End file.
